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alphadogg writes "Alcatel-Lucent has come up with a way to move data at 300Mbps over copper lines. So far the results have only been reproduced in a lab environment — real products and services won't be available for at least a year. From the article: 'Researchers at the company's Bell Labs demonstrated the 300Mbps technology over a distance of 400 meters using VDSL2 (Very high bitrate Digital Subscriber Line), according to Stefaan Vanhastel, director of product marketing at Alcatel-Lucent Wireline Networks. The test showed that it can also do 100Mbps over a distance of 1,000 meters, he said. Currently, copper is the most common broadband medium. About 65 percent of subscribers have a broadband connection that's based on DSL, compared to 20 percent for cable and 12 percent for fiber, according to market research company Point Topic. Today, the average advertised DSL speeds for residential users vary between 9.2 Mbps and 1.9Mbps in various parts of the world, Point Topic said.'"

VDSL2 deteriorates quickly from a theoretical maximum of 250 Mbit/s at 'source' to 100 Mbit/s at 0.5 km (1640 ft) and 50 Mbit/s at 1 km (3280 ft), but degrades at a much slower rate from there, and still outperforms VDSL. Starting from 1.6 km (1 mile) its performance is equal to ADSL2+.

I have tried to get a VDSL2 for a few times during the past 5 years, but the prices are high and availability really bad. Even 100 Mbit/s fiber is a lot more common. ISP's also always responded that I live too far away from the center, even while it really was only about 1-1.5km (but that would had got me "just" 50 Mbit/s anyway, now with this 100 Mbit/s)

The nice thing about VDSL2 is that unlike ADSL, it's symmetric. The 300Mbps over a distance of 400 meters is damn good too, but theres no centers in every corner.

The biggest advantage, atleast for me, for VDSL2 over ADSL2+ is the upstream bandwidth. I can easily live with 25Mbps connection, maybe even with 10Mbps, if I get atleast 5Mbps up. Currently I have both connection types in use at my home and the VDSL2 connects at 54M/46M and ADSL2+ at 22M/1.9M. HTTP traffic is load balanced over both connections, gaming traffic goes over the ADSL2+ and everything else uses the VDSL2. Finally I can upload files to my servers in just minutes, not hours.

Network neutrality means ISPs being neutral about the content flowing through their pipes. Open access means owners of the pipes allowing others to provide internet service on that infrastructure for a fee.

But man, what an idea... imagine a world where the pipe owners competed for ISPs as customers, and ISPs competed for subscribers...

I am an ignorant in these matters I admit but to me it seems there are situations in which either there is no competition (high barriers to entry) or ones where competitors exist but they do not have to compete because change between them is impossible, cumbersome or made so expensive that such change is not feasible. Some of those situations are called natural monopolies. Of course free market freaks (FMF) would not accept even that such term describes existing situation but closer look at the reality prov

ISP's also always responded that I live too far away from the center, even while it really was only about 1-1.5km (but that would had got me "just" 50 Mbit/s anyway, now with this 100 Mbit/s)

I've always gotten the same runaround when trying to get DSL service.The short answer is that "1-1.5km" (as the bird flies) is not at all representative of how far the copper is running above/under ground to reach your home.

If you ever lookup* the coverage map for DSL in your area you'll get an idea of how the cables run from the CLEC.

*good luck, it's probably stashed in some county office's locked filing cabinet behind a sign that says "beware of the leopard".

I suspect that even in the UK (which has a much higher population density than the US) the majority of people live more than 1km from an exchange...and this assumes that the copper is relatively new and has clean connections....

In the US I suspect this is completely pointless for most people.... the only thing is that it might mean that they can get broadband at all...

I suspect that even in the UK (which has a much higher population density than the US) the majority of people live more than 1km from an exchange...and this assumes that the copper is relatively new and has clean connections....

It's not distance from the CO building that matters, but from the DSLAM [wikipedia.org], which are easy to deploy in any densely populated area, and relatively cost effective.
The ~1.5 Km range is from one of these [wikimedia.org]

ISP's also always responded that I live too far away from the center, even while it really was only about 1-1.5km (but that would had got me "just" 50 Mbit/s anyway, now with this 100 Mbit/s)

I've always gotten the same runaround when trying to get DSL service.
The short answer is that "1-1.5km" (as the bird flies) is not at all representative of how far the copper is running above/under ground to reach your home.

If you ever lookup* the coverage map for DSL in your area you'll get an idea of how the cables run from the CLEC.

But even that map (if you can get it) won't tell you very much. The way they measure the distance is by firing a signal down it and somehow measuring the timing of reflections (hopefully someone will chime in with a more detailed and accurate explanation of the process). That measures true wire distance, including any extra twists and turns, and any coiled-up wire lying around.

A few years ago, my DSL service was terrible. I kept complaining until they finally sent someone out to look at it. Turns out,

VDSL2 is not symmetric, nor does it give anywhere near 50mbit at 1km. At 1km (~3000ft) and in the real world, you will get around 30-35mbit down, 3-4mbit up, and this is with VDSL2 8B (~20.5db launch power), not the lower power VDSL 1.5 crap AT&T deployed.

VDSL2 has many band plans, some of which (ie: VDSL2 12A & 30A) can support symmetric bandwidth if the loop is short enough. Higher frequencies attenuate faster than lower frequencies, since the 2nd upstream band starts at 3.75mhz, very few VDSL2's

What that argument never explains, though, is why basically none of the US has decent home internet access.

Obviously, somebody in the sticks depending on satellite, or using a wildly-uneconomic-but-universal-access-fee-subsidized copper POTS line is going to have lousy internet access. Barring a government(probably federal) initiative on a grand scale, or the invention of a magic WISP that doesn't have lousy ping, that isn't going to change.

This is already happening. I know of at least one company that is building out fiber networks in semi-rural towns of a few thousand using federal loans under rural development programs. Those rural towns have better service than I do, now.http://www.usda.gov/rus/telecom/broadband.htm [usda.gov] is the program they are working with, I believe.

3) TFA also states "over two copper lines". It sounds like 4 wires are required (1 line=2 wire). If this is indeed the case, might as well bring the fiber into the house instead of a second pair of copper wires;-))

Most homes have been wired for 2 lines for decades. The wall plates might only support 1 line, but the house wiring generally supports 2. And the cables running to the home frequently support 4 or more lines, even if only 1 is hooked up.

So, I don't really see 3 as being an issue. They certainly won't be tearing up anyones yards to implement this.

No they won't. POTS landlines are a dying product. Do you really think that your local ILEC has a shortage of free copper pairs in the local loop? Not likely, unless you live on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.

I do, however, have 2 lines running to my house; it's apparently a Tennessee requirement.

That doesn't mean there's actually two copper pairs available on the outside plant. My employer is out in the middle of nowhere -- we have 25 pairs coming into our building from the pole. Only using eight of them, six for POTS lines and two for a T-1. When we had the T-1 provisioned it took them 12 weeks to make it happen -- they didn't have two free pairs on their plant and wound up having to multiplex some of the POTS lines to free them up.

"That doesn't mean there's actually two copper pairs available on the outside plant"

As I said, I think it would in most places in Tennessee; they refused to call it a subsidized thing, but the TN congress made a deal with Bellsouth, or possible MA Bell, that TN residents could get ISDN for $35 a month; I'm pretty sure it's still in effect. I first tried it back in '97 when ISDN was a pretty speedy option for getting on the internet, then in '05 when I came back to the state again and ISDN was the only way

Ah, ISDN. I never got to mess around with that at home. We did use it to connect some remote offices once upon a time. One time it stopped working and my Cisco router started throwing a weird error code that nobody (not even a CCIE friend of mine) had ever seen before. The calls were being made but disappearing in the ether somewhere. It took Verizon three days to figure out what had gone wrong with their switch. Most of that time was spent trying to explain what ISDN was to their techs. They finally

The streets are mostly fiber, even in the 13k town in Northern Minnesota where I grew up. The copper only runs from your local Central Office to your home. This could be a few miles or it could be right in your neighborhood. Cable companies have largely done this, too. Fiber to a distribution point, and then a coax line feeding each neighborhood. The only difference with the cable companies is that you share that piece of coax with your neighbors, whereas the copper bundle with 4-8 pairs (of which your usin

The issue is how the phone companies operate. You can only make what the consumer is willing to spend. 9 times out of 10 they have a monopoly in the area so why worry. No one can snatch you away from their service. They have no one to compete with and drive them to provide the best service possible. You probably won't see any change with consumer internet connections.

I was hooking up some phones at my father's new house (god, almost a decade ago now...) and it had 4 lines in the walls (8 individual wires). Being 15 or 16 at the time, I was a terrible electrician and had no idea which cables to go with. So I did the most sensible thing and had my brother lick them.

Lucky for him, you're right. Only 1 pair was hooked up to power. A few aluminum foil and duct-tape splices and we had dial-up!

My point being that this was nearly ten years ago. People still get their internet o

He might live in America. Here anything after the point of entry into the building is owned by the home owner. The telephone company owns the lines in your yard and the box on the side of your house, but beyond that it's the home owner's responsibility. The boxes generally even have an unlocked side where the home owner can attach their own lines

Do me a favor and take off your wall plate. You'll probably find a cord with Red, Yellow, Green, and Black wires. That's 4. For 2 phone lines.

It's cheaper to run 1 cable with 4 wires now, and then attach the unused wires later than it is to run 1 cable with 2 wires and then rip out walls later. Likewise, it's cheaper to bury one cable with 6 or 8 wires between your house and your neighborhood CO than it is to run 1 cable with 2 wires and then dig up the ground when you decide you want a 2nd phone line for a

"3) TFA also states "over two copper lines". It sounds like 4 wires are required (1 line=2 wire). If this is indeed the case, might as well bring the fiber into the house instead of a second pair of copper wires;-))"

I thought 'standard' telephone line had two twisted pairs (four wires) in the line? I don't think anyone is suggesting running a second line into premises that only have one line at the moment?

This sounds like it would be used to allow the phone company to maybe run fiber optic to your block, a

However, standard practice here in Australia, as required by telecommunication's law is actually 2 pairs. Red & Black and Green & Black I think. Never was a techie, just did line programming & cable records.

The problem I can see with 4 wire services is when it comes to apartment blocks/units/flats or any type of "gated" community. That's when things become there responsibility of the builder/body corporate. The telcos only have requirements

However, standard practice here in Australia, as required by telecommunication's law is actually 2 pairs. Red & Black and Green & Black I think. Never was a techie, just did line programming & cable records.

I was a techie (exchange mtce), then got suckered into liney-land via DSL installs / faults.

2 pairs - White & Blue, Red & Black (mostly) - but that's only for the lead-in from the pit to the NBP (first socket / external J-box), or maybe from the building MDF or IDFs to the unit/townhouse. In theory, internal stuff should be at least 2pr, but you've gotta remember 90+% of it these days is installed by builders (i.e. as cheaply as possible) & signed off by their pet electricians, so that's not a given. Plenty of single-pair in internal cabling, although that's rapidly being superseded by CAT-5 - which they usually manage to put a staple through, crush under sheeting, or just plain stretch so you're *lucky* to get a single pair that works...

(Seriously - I've forgotten how many brand-spankin'-new installs I'd attended where I had to split all 4 pairs differently around the house just to get a single line to all points.)

And let's not talk about the so-called "technician" contractors Telstra passes the lead-in installs & replacements to. I've seen lead-in buried solid (with just short lengths of conduit at the building and pit end end so it passes inspection), and CAT-5 lead-in that's such crap it's gone low IR 40 minutes after getting damp...

Besides, as a cable assigner you'd know the real problem is the lack of free/working pairs in the mains to the pillar, or especially the O-side street cabling. A 2pr lead-in is fine, but there's nowhere near enough capacity to extend 2 pairs for more than a few people all the way back to the pillar, let alone the exchange or local cabinet...

many trunk lines already probably have an extra set, since they are designed for many lines per house. they could just throw extra lines into the digital stream. As well, it would cut costs to implement, since a loop extender can be added at 1 km, so it reduces the amount of new cable that must be laid. Its a far better way to get broadband to rural areas than the crazy and dumb idea of BPL.

May the gods bless these magnificent researchers with a bountiful harvest, many wives and obedient children.

Seriously, what pisses me off more than anything about the past 10 years of broadband was we were moving towards such a bright future with the ability to choose from dozens of DSL providers in some areas until they stopped upgrading the DSLAMS in my area and we were stuck at 8 Mb/s. I checked recently and the fastest I can get at my new apartment is 1 Mb/s for DSL.

The problem with all copper lines is capacitance,which acts as a low pass filter. The longer the line the more high frequencies are lost, which in effect takes the "edges" off of the pulses, making differetiation difficult. No ammount of technolgy is going to change the laws of physics. (:

All kinds of tricks are use such as QAM and different forms of compression to cram more down a copper pair.

All POTS work on 2 wires. Even if one has several pairs coming into the premises it is unlikely that there will be enough spares all the way to the exchange.(Would you put in double the ammount of copper needed on the off chance that it might be needed later.

This would be used to connect to mini-DSLAM's at the node level, not to the CO (Exchange). Besides, in the US there was always plenty of spare capacity in the 500 pair trunks for extra revenue services like multi-line businesses, and with somewhere approaching half of all households dropping landlines and businesses going with VoIP offerings I bet there's more spare pairs then ever.

It's WAY cheaper to drop a slightly bigger cable in the trench then it is to dig a new trench or use some kind of gizmo that has to be powered and maintained at the node level. Heck, for our new building (~200k sq ft) they brought in 3x 100 pair even though it's unlikely more than a hundred would ever be used even if we get a bunch of smaller tenants using POTS.

do you think ANYONE believes that which I quote of you above, after reading the URL below it?

Frankly I doubt anyone but me is even bothering to read your copy pasta troll.

I am but just so I can;

"Troll the troll"

(This time to the tune of Can the Can)

Even the reception kids at my schools do netter at annoying me than you AC, all you have done so far is amuse greatly. With the reliable networks I supervise, Ihave nothing to do at work most pf the time.

I am impervious to this troll, (As I said i work with primary kids all the time, just water off a ducks back) there is nothing he has done or said that has done anything other than amuse me greatly.The longer he tries the funnier his thrashing around gets! He simply cannot make me angry.

I thouigh that the idea of mod points was to improve the discussion, and modding spammers like this baby to the hidden zone is exactly the kind of thing it is for.

Never had trouble getting a second phone line installed anywhere I lived in Canada. They'd just hook it up at the pole, and sometimes run a second line (4 wires) from the pole to the house if the existing run wasn't good enough. Then again, DSL in Canada was cheaper in 1999 than when I was living in Australia last year... maybe it's just typical Telestra BS. They have spare lines to the exchange, but maybe not enough for every house in a neighbourhood to have two or more lines.

The exciting thing is that you're not missing anything; DSL in Canada hasn't changed since 1999. Sure they advertise higher "up to" speeds for both DSL and Cable, but they're both so ridiculously oversubscribed and filtered that you'll still be getting about 3M bits/sec down on good days.

Bell's got a service called "Fibe" (http://bell.ca/fibe) now, which suggests fiber, but is just ADSL2, IIRC. There's basically no fiber to the home in Canada at this time. But at least we pay a lot!

I was getting quite a lot of G.DMT connection (not ADSL2+) for $25 from Teksavvy.com when I when I moved to China two years ago. It looks to me like prices have gone up to $30 speeds down from 6mbs to 5mbs. At least they still offer dry loop DSL. Here in the UK one is required to have a phone line (BT charges about £10-15) before evening paying for the internet connection (£25 - expensive compared to Canada even after the crash of GBP), and only getting 6mbs/448kbs (yes that upstream is killi

I thought I'd head something about a version that demanded a better quality cable as a baseline in order to use fewer pairs. I checked Google for 'copper Gb ehternet', which got me information from Wikipedia.

1000Base-T requires four pair of Cat5 or higher.1000Base-TX requires two pair of Cat6 or higher.

1000Base-TX is largely a commercial failure, and many 1000Base-T items are incorrectly labeled 1000Base-TX out of confusion, since the most popular version of 100 is 100Base-TX.

Qwest is still too cheap to put in a new DSLAM to give me 1.5 Mb. Where I live in the middle of a city of about 60,000, it might as well be a giant trailer park for all the service we get here. On the other hand, Comcast has the whole place wired to as fast as possible.

Where I live in the middle of a city of about 60,000, it might as well be a giant trailer park for all the service we get here.

Hey, you insensitive city-slicker, nowadays we say "mobile home neighborhood." Don't be tryin ta keep us down with yer "trail park" junk. Ya'll can keep ya'll's high-rise apartments, wiel we be OWNIN are double-wide son. Yall just gel-us cus we get the same computer internet AND EBAY plus we can park the rig rite next too are door. Step here bringin that and well get the 12 gauge

They so often say you need to be 1 km from the CO. But a loop extender or node can be used to extend it to areas far beyond 1 km distance, in fact, to extend service many, many miles away, even dozens, basically which rejuvenates the signal, and possibly connects to a fiber trunk, although electronics can probably be developed to regenerate the signal even over a very long copper run, which is made even easier with the digital signal. The investment in that is far less than laying all new cable. It requires perhaps some electronic equipment every mile or so. This would, it is often forgotten, cut down on the cost needed to extend broadband to remote areas. It is probably the cheapest way to do it as much of the infrastructure can be reused. Its much better than the insane and crazy idea of BPL which is unfeasible and has so many more technical problems (RFI).

If it were really that easy, telcos would already be doing so to get high-speed VDSL2 (U-verse and such) to more of their urban and suburban customers who are sitting just out of range of those services. They aren't doing this, so clearly there's a major catch.

It's things like bridge taps that cause destructive interference and mangle the DSL signal, grounding issues, cumulative interference, etc, that are the real problems with getting very high speed DSL out into the boonies. Even improper termination or a rusty nail rubbing against the line can cause enough interference to kill a DSL signal!

There can be a lot of problems even still. I can see the local box from my window (well, I could if there wasn't a house in the way), and I had the damndest time getting VDSL installed. DSL had problems too, but the higher bitrate of VDSL caused the problems to get a lot worse.

Had intermittent outages from February through November. Called 9 times for AT&T guys to come out and look at it, but it always started working again before they got here, so they'd just kind of dick around, proclaim it fixed, and

I live about ~3km from my exchange (in Australia), which unfortunately reduces my 24 Mbps (max) ADSL2+ service to 6.2 Mbit (without interleaving) or 7.7 Mbit (with interleaving). Any technology that can squeeze a bit more out of my old rusty copper wire sounds nice to me, at least until the national broadband network (fibre) gets rolled out in 3-4 more years.

Having said that I have a funny suspicion this won't help anyone stuck on a longer line (i.e. any line that wouldn't really support VDSL now). The move from ADSL1 to ADSL2 and ADSL2+ improved the 'max' speed of the service for those close to the exchange, but any xDSL technology seems to hit a certain distance where that benefit is lost.

This graph [on.net] shows this nicely - ADSL2+ (in green) is way faster than ADSL1 (blue) for shorter/less attenuated lines. But beyond around 4km, it offers virtually no improvement at all. And I suspect the laws of physics are at play here such that this new VDSL variant wouldn't be any different.

In some ways I am lucky, I live in the south-west, a city called Exeter, 40 miles from Plymouth and the Mayflower Steps for the yanks. In some ways this is lucky because this region is used to market test many products and technologies before they get a nationwide launch.

In 2001 BT first offered ADSL, it was 128/512 kbit, and used the green alcatel stingray / frog thing.

In 2004 Telewest took over the cable TV/telephone company, and put in the internet as a cable option, I switched.

Today I can get either max 8 mbit adsl over (twisted pair) copper, or max 50 mbit cable over (coax) copper.

Due to traffic shaping and throttling and oversold contention ratios, I can max out the 8 mbit adsl at a rock solid 6 mbit and actually achieve a greater throughput than I can from the theoretically far faster (up to) 20 mbit cable package.

The only other alternative was either ISDN or horrendously expensive leased line, which started at around 30k bucks per annum for 2 mbit.

I spent 5 years up until 2004 trying to convince the cable company to provide internet over their pipes, and quite frankly even though I was talking to senior managers they just didn't "get it".

I have to tell you that nothing has changed, they still don't "get it", "it" being the internet.

They still think in dial up terms of pence per minute, or utility terms of pence per kWh or cubic foot.

Frankly speaking the UK economy is fucked, and none of the politicians get it either, especially not the pirate party, in the run up to the general elections.

What we need is a MASSIVE public works deal, just like the yank New Deal when they built the interstates, and roll out SYMMETRIC cable AND ipv6 to every home, set a target, project to be completed within 3 years.

Since we are starting today we need to future proof, so it has to be gigabit each way.

It has to be fibre / laser, not anything on copper, or anything wireless.

It will have the same effect as the building of the interstates, it will open and enable markets that previously did not exist.

Even allowing for overspends, it would come in at less than 50 billion UK pounds, and that spread over 3 years.

All slashdotters, ask yourself this, can you see any opportunities for yourself, and your company, if you were told this was being rolled out in your area? project starting in 4 months and completed in 40?

gigabit up/down and ipv6, does this enable anything you can't do now? things that will generate revenue and stimulate the economy? things that will have a benefit for society that can't just be measured in dollars and cents?

Since we are starting today we need to future proof, so it has to be gigabit each way.

What's the point? Your cable example shows exactly why the last mile is not the problem: you'll get throttled upstream anyway.

Which reminds me, Virgin Media are well overdue a bitch-slapping from the ASA for their ludicrous speed claims. The basic 10Mb/s package is a joke, since it only takes 10 minutes use at 10Mb/s to hit the usage cap and get throttled down to 2Mb/s. In effect, it's a 2Mb/s service with occasional b

Calm down, Sparky. If you want to roll out some Communist "3 year plan", then sure, let's get on it, but it needs to be targeted at the backbone, not the last mile. Create a surplus of supply (more backbone capacity), and the cost of supplying to the home will come down. Just drive up demand at the home, make the supply even scarcer, and what do you think will happen to the cost, or the service?

Considering that people use unmetalled roads mainly for walking, or the pony and trap, which is not that demanding. The major high capacity loads are transporting foodstuffs. Therefore I doubt that widescale metalled roads and interstates will do much to boost the economy.

For those who want to see things be "open" so that multiple providers can use the same wires, you need to have an infrastructure in place that has not been paid for ONLY by private companies, and that is where the problems come from. For DSL service here in the USA, much of the copper infrastructure for the telephone system was subsidized by the US government in the push to put telephone coverage in EVERY house. This is why for DSL, you CAN have multiple providers in a given area in the USA. For ca

Great, now the ISPs will have even higher speeds to lie to us about in their advertising.

Seriously. All this means is that we will hit our caps faster, and/or will feel the throttling more painfully.

When you are being throttled to 25Kb/s, it dosen't matter how fast your last mile can go - It becomes all aboutmaking long-haul ISP links cheap as dirt so the ISP dosent feel a need to throttle their oversubscribed backhaul link to the 'net.

Those of you excited about this should take a closer look. This is a breakthrough for data over copper, but fiber is faster, and this tech is only useful for locations that are densely populated with short wire distances... IE the same locations where fiber could be installed economically. There have been dozens of "breakthroughs" like this over the years, and none of them has substantially improved high speed access in the US. Mostly they're incremental upgrades for DSL users, a lot of whom don't see t

The US has far longer telephone/DSL local loop lengths than almost any other country. Average US local loops are over 4 km, compared with 3 km in the UK and France, or under 2 km in Germany and Italy. And unlike most European countries, almost no loops in the US are under 1.5 km, and the US is one of the few countries to have significant numbers of loops (10% of customers) over 5.5 km. Data source here [tinyurl.com].